LZR-1143: Redemption (27 page)

FORTY

I put my hand on the door, noticing as I did so the heavy push bar on this side, meaning that the door opened out and into the next room or hallway. Since I didn’t know for sure what was on the other side, I didn’t open it immediately.

The cat remained stationary at the far end of the hall, where I had come in. I pressed the transmit button on the radio.

“Why don’t you come join me?” I said softly. “Leave Ky with Rhodes. I’ll send Romeo back.”

“Got it, hold on.”

“Romeo, find Ky,” I said briefly, and the dog shot past me and down the hall, stopping long enough to pause while Kate made her way toward us. She opened the door, and the dog loped into the hallway, tail wagging slightly in anticipation of seeing Ky.

“We got company?” she said, voice energized slightly.

I felt the same way. I had feared we had led ourselves into a tomb by entering the building, and I was hopeful about the people on the other side.

“Seems that way,” I said, taking the butt of my pistol and rapping it firmly on the metal three times, in an even succession of beats.

The furious pounding stopped briefly, as if the person on the other side were confused by the response.

Several long seconds passed.

Then, five beats, a pause, and two more.

A familiar beat.

I repeated the same, then tried raising my voice.

“We’re looking for Doctor Kopland. Can you hear me?”

A muffled voice sounded through the door, but I couldn’t make out the words. I turned to Kate and tossed her my pistol.

“Aim low. If they even twitch, take them in the leg. We can’t risk hitting the guy we’re looking for. Ready?”

She nodded, eyes trained on where the gap between the door and the wall would appear. I took a deep breath and pushed the bar in, allowing the door to swing open slowly as I stepped back.

At first, the light from the space beyond was blinding and I blinked before making out the face of a young man with a tightly trimmed beard, bright blue eyes, and a dirty brown blazer. His eyes were squinting into the darkness of our hallway, and I spoke quickly.

“Dr. Kopland?” I asked urgently.

His face screwed up in confusion, his eyes widening slightly.

“Yes,” he said doubtfully. “Yes, that’s me. Do I know you?”

I smiled widely and stepped forward, seeing that he wasn’t armed.

“Not yet, but you’re about to.”

Before he could ask what I knew would be hundreds of questions, an orange streak shot past my leg and into the air, landing heavily on the doctor’s chest, pushing him back slightly as a smile appeared on his face.

“Oppenheimer!”

I glanced at Kate and nodded at her to move forward. She took the time to call Ky and tell her to stay put, before moving toward the doorway.

“Don’t let the door shut!” The young man admonished, even as he fended off the cat on his chest.

Kate stopped at the doorframe and looked around, finally settling her eyes on the room to the left where I had found the cat. She grabbed a large wooden desk chair and planted it firmly between the door and the frame.

“So, Doctor. I—”

“I’m sorry, please come in. I’m not sure… Well, I can guess, but it seems… Anyway, come.” He spoke hurriedly, and slightly confused before gesturing us to come in, finally managing to dislodge the cat and put it on the ground again.

“Oppy knocked the block out of the door when he was going in a couple days ago, and he got locked out—and we got locked in. Not that we were going anywhere, but… that’s his room, because of the air and the allergies, and… sorry, I’m rambling.”

He led us into a brightly lit hallway, walls starkly white washed, thick glass windows interspersed along the passage with large rooms stacked with glassware and other scientific machines and computers. Vacant offices, a small break room, and a small room with regular computers and monitors all lined the hallway as we continued.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, we don’t want to be rude—”

“Do you want some coffee or tea or something? I think we have some hot chocolate in—”

“Doctor!” Kate spoke loudly and stopped walking. Her voice brooked no dissent, and it stopped his rambling as he turned and stared, seeming to see us for the first time.

“Yes, I’m sorry. Welcome to the facility, I assume you are the folks I’ve been waiting for?”

I nodded as Kate spoke.

“I’m Dr. Kate Whitmore. This is Mike McKnight. We had an appointment with you that we intend to keep.”

He stared for several seconds, then smiled slightly.

“But of course you are. Well, let’s get to it, then.”

*

Kopland wasn’t alone. A young woman, an assistant researcher, had also taken refuge in the facility after the events began to unfold. Diana Crawley was barely twenty-two, with large eyes, thick glasses, and hair to her waist held back from her face by a neatly tied string. She wore an old, torn University of Washington sweatshirt over a pair of yoga pants—an outfit I found odd until Kopland explained their unique situation.

“I was here early that day, already working. Diana was on her way to an early morning class when things got… weird. She decided to stop in and see if anyone was at the lab yet. It was just me and Matt, and she didn’t want to leave until we knew more. I had been working on some research into an Ebola strain that was particularly virulent in low temperatures, which is odd, because…”

“Doc,” said Diana, chewing absently on the end of a pen as she stared at me. I wasn’t sure if it was the superpowers, the apocalypse, or the former movie stardom, but she wasn’t shy about it.

“Yes, well,” he shook himself out of the rambling as he flicked the end of the empty vial he was going to use to take a large sample of blood from my arm. The damn needle looked about seven inches thick.

“Anyway, we watched the television from here, and saw the National Guard arrive, and just… well, we just never left. We don’t keep clothes here, and so you’ll have to excuse us for our appearance.”

Kate laughed suddenly, and I smiled. I looked down at my blood and gore crusted spec ops suit, and Kate lifted her hands, still covered in fairly fresh blood from the fight outside.

“We can relate, Doctor.” She said.

“Shit, lady. Come on, we can get you cleaned up.” Diana rose, nodding her head toward a bathroom at the far side of the room.

“Diana, start with a hundred cc’s from the Doctor, please,” Kopland said as he inserted the needle into my arm and pressed down with his finger to steady the metal rod.

I winced.

“Interesting,” he said, looking up at my face.

“What’s that?”

“Pain. I understood that you… I mean, that…”

“We heal fast and we have enhanced strength, but it still hurts to get injured. Seems as if you should know that.”

He chuckled, self-deprecatingly shaking his head. Oily, long hair framed his thin face over his beard. His bright eyes seemed genuinely amused.

“Well, we’ve had some issues with communication, and they didn’t have a full file on you and your friend the last time we spoke so…”

He squinted as he trailed off, finger pressing against my skin again as he drew the needle out, vial full of thick red blood. He reached for a band-aid and I smiled.

“Uh, Doc?”

He looked at me blankly for a minute, then removed his hand from my skin, where he had been holding his finger, likely by mere muscle memory, to stem any bleeding.

The skin was unbroken.

“Oh, yes. Well.” He stared for a minute, then pulled the vial from the plunger and put a small sticker on it.

“So, Doc, what happened here? How’d your comms get knocked out? And how the hell did you get locked in?”

“Matt,” said Diana from the doorway, where she was following Kate back in the room, an empty vial in her hand. Kopland nodded gravely, moving to a small desk, getting more engrossed in his work as he began writing quickly in a logbook. Diana took a needle and plunger from the cabinet above Kate’s head and motioned to a chair.

“Matt?” Kate asked.

“That’s how the communications went down,” clarified Kopland. “As to the lockdown, we can only postulate, but we’re fairly certain. There’s a security office in the hospital that controls entry for the main building and several of the other outbuildings around here that are connected to the building. They do infectious disease work here, and there’s a doomsday sort of switch for use in extreme circumstances. Normally, the doors are designed to be released during an emergency to allow people to get out. But this protocol locks the doors to keep people in. All external doors go into lockdown, and all internal doors only open from the outside in, not the other way around.”

“So someone initiated it?”

“We heard an argument and a fight over the intercom two days after the disease had started to take hold. The television was reporting on the National Guard outside getting pressed by sick people and those things, almost to a breaking point. People inside were riled up, people were dying and getting put down—or biting others. It was stressful inside. In the end, it was two guards, both low level guys, I recognized them both. Someone was leaning on the transmit key or something. One guy was trying to activate the doors, keep everyone in. His family had been attacked, and he thought that if they kept all the infected in the hospital, the disease wouldn’t spread. He was sick in the head. Not right. The other guy tried to keep him from doing it. There was a fight, a gunshot, then silence. Then, all the doors slammed shut, and the shit hit the fan.” She approached Kate, asking her to pull back her sleeve.

“And Matt?” I asked, glancing at Kopland, who was still hunched over a small booklet.

“Matt was with us here for the first day. He came in to work, despite getting mugged earlier in the morning. Well, he said it was a mugging, but he admitted they didn’t try to take anything.”

“Ah,” I said and Kate nodded. “So he was infected. But how…”

“How’d that affect us getting our equipment knocked out, and getting locked in here? Good question.”

Kopland looked up, face drawn.

“I’m afraid that was my fault. When he turned, we didn’t know what to do. We initially locked him in an exam room after he… woke up. When it was clear he was violent—remember, we hadn’t been outside for any of this, just seen it on the television—we had no choice. We didn’t—we couldn’t—kill him.”

Diana pulled the needle from Kate’s arm and Kate didn’t flinch, just rolling her sleeve down as the woman dislodged the vial from the plunger.

“Yeah, well. We didn’t do a great job of locking the door. Someone forgot that the internal locks would disengage when the power flickered, so when we switched from mains to jenny power a few weeks ago, he got loose. I woke up and found him wandering the halls. We tried to push him back into the exam room, but we pushed him into the office with the radio and government equipment instead. We ended up killing him with a metal trashcan to the noggin. But he fell on the equipment. And that was that.”

“So, welcome, at long last,” said Kopland, rising and moving to some laboratory equipment at the side of the room.

“Yeah, thanks.” I said. “Listen, we have a friend who broke his arm. Bad compound fracture.”

“Can we use your facilities to fix him up?” Kate asked, watching as Diana stared at me again, tapping the vial of blood against her palm absently.

“Of course,” said Kopland, distracted. “Any of the exam rooms. But… don’t use sixteen. We wrapped it up, but… we had nowhere to put Matt, so it’s a little pungent.”

Right. No on sixteen.

Rotting body.

Check.

FORTY-ONE

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Diana and Kopland were still working nearly six hours later, after we had gotten Rhodes moved, cleaned up and re-sedated. Kate had done her best to address the wound, but he would need surgery before being out of the woods. There was no sign of infection yet, so that was a plus. But he was not going to be in fighting shape any time soon.

Our contact with SeaTac was unsettling. We established a link long enough to report our position, and that we had made contact. After that, though, we couldn’t make out any of their transmissions. It seemed frantic on the other side of the line, and the most we could determine was that the herds were close, or had already started to arrive. Remembering the massive numbers on the move in the city, we knew it was a concern. And that we were working against the clock.

Kate, Ky and I took turns in the facility’s small shower, trying as best we could to wash filthy clothes in the sink. The suits we had been provided weren’t necessarily washer and dryer friendly, even if they had had one on site. And they were Gore-Tex, which facilitated an easy wipe off, but a harder deep clean. So in the end, we claimed a spare room, laid down and stole some sleep.

Nearly twelve hours after we arrived, I awoke to the smell of coffee—a luxury I had nearly forgotten in the recent days.

Ky was still sleeping in the small bed next to Kate’s cot, and I unwound myself from the stiff chair at the edge of the room, making my way to the hallway, where Romeo was staring suspiciously at Oppenheimer the cat, who sat unconcerned on the top of a row of cabinets inside the only room with lights on. I blinked groggily at a digital clock on the counter, which read 18:54.

Inside the small room, which had a breakfast table and delicate wooden chairs inside a kitchenette, I followed the smell and sound of the brewing coffee, nodding once to Diana, who was absently stirring her own cup.

“Anything interesting?” I asked, picking up a cup and inhaling deeply before touching the warm porcelain to my lips. I never thought I would savor the experience of coffee that came in a five-gallon drum from a big-box grocery store.

Guess there were a lot of things I didn’t much expect, though.

Walking dead. Apocalypse. Murder rap. Looney bin.

And Twitter.

Didn’t see
that
coming. What the hell is
that
about? Who has so much to say in such little space? If you can fit a summary of your most poignant thoughts in that few characters, you needed to work on your ‘thought’ repertoire.

She stared for a moment as I zoned out. Then she sipped her coffee pensively, nodding once toward the counter, where the digital clock sat in front of a box of crackers.

“Waiting for it to bake,” she said slowly.

“Bake?”

My mind conjured images of a blood pie or a vampire making bread.

“We put the plasma through a variety of tests, and we have to wait for the results. Takes time. Dr. Kopland will give you more detail when he wakes up.” She pointed behind her to the fridge. “Food in there, if you’re interested.”

I didn’t wait, making a beeline for the food as my stomach roared in delight.

“How’d you guys end up with so much food in here,” I asked, pulling the door open to cartons of UHT milk, assorted cheeses and dried meats, and some other random, easily stored items.

“We were stocked up a year ago by some guys from the government. I wasn’t here, but the doc told me about it. Boxes of those freeze-dried meals, bottled water, you name it—little storeroom down the hall is full of the stuff. We had taken to raiding it at random in the middle of the night for snacks while we were working, before all this stuff. All the special radio equipment and stuff too. We have a generator that’s been humming’ along nicely since all the shit hit the fan, so that’s been nice. Otherwise, we’d be in total darkness down here. Plus, not sure if the locks on the internal doors—like the one between us and the hospital—would stay closed if the jenny went down. Matt told me it was a different circuit or some crap like that.”

The supplies must have been a precaution. I wonder if they knew, at the time, about the possibilities. It seemed impossible to imagine. Obviously, they didn’t know about what Kopland’s insane father would unleash on the world, but there were other madmen out there—or there used to be. All with the desire and the power to release death on the world in the form of a disease. Stations like these must have been deemed vital to national security.

In a world where people like the senior Kopland could get away with what he did, under the noses of our supposedly omniscient government, foresight like that involved with the simple act of stocking a small lab with food and communication equipment as a precaution seemed otherworldly.

The crackers and cheese tasted amazing. Even as I squirted another layer of cheese—well, more accurately, “cheese-like substance”—onto my dry, overly salted cracker, I realized that objectively, it was horrible. But right now, it tasted like filet mignon covered in beer-battered bacon.

“Have you two tried to get out since the lock-down? Tried to figure a way out of here?”

She shook her head, and leaned back in her chair, eyes rolling slightly and her hand cupped the mug, enjoying the warmth. Her glasses slipped down her nose several millimeters as she looked past me.

“That would be… unwise.” Doctor Kopland walked past me, pulling a mug from the counter and down to the coffee pot. “I’m surprised you didn’t see them on your way in. There are thousands of them in the hospital, even more outside. To release our doors in order to exit—even if we had such ability at hand—well, it would be suicide. They would eventually find a way in, and we could not outrun them all.” He poured a rather obscene amount of sugar into his mug and stirred the high-octane mixture with a butter knife before sipping it.

“No, we had work to do. Even now, we’re hoping that my research applied to the problem will be beneficial. I’m fairly confident we can build from the vaccine, and solve this problem, now that we have your samples. It’s a… difficult… problem, but not insurmountable. My father…” His apparently habitual pause as he considered words was longer here, more studied. “My father had a particular type of intelligence. A particular type of skill, to be sure, but unsophisticated.”

“Why do you say that?”

He rounded the table, and leaned against the counter next to me, so that we were both staring away from the doorway and toward the far wall. A small picture on the wall of a pastoral scene in Ireland or Scotland was a tiny window into a world that used to exist.

“This… plague. It is virulent and sophisticated in its own right. It’s fast, but not too fast. It’s incredibly transmissible. It’s almost perfectly designed to spread. It even has a radioactive quality—one that, I know you have already determined—allows its victims and hosts to sense one another, but which also plays into making the vaccine operate. These are marks of a complex virus.” He took a sip, pulling a lip back to savor the taste, his beard retaining small droplets of coffee. “But not perfect. Far from perfect.”

I guffawed loudly.

“Doesn’t have to be perfect, though, does it, Doc? It’s doing okay out there, believe me.”

He nodded seriously.

“Yes, it is. But a virus is more lethal when it’s simple: single-minded and unstoppable. The focus in designing this one was on making the element that they located in Israel into a weapon. To making the symptoms—and the resulting state—transmissible and infectious. To allowing this element to be exploited. And they succeeded. They took this element, and made it into a plague that spreads, without the need for more of the original element, which was particularly tricky.”

“But…?” I drew it out, halfway joking.

“It can be beaten. Or, rather, it has been beaten. By your wonderful wife—I’m so sorry, by the way. She designed a vaccine that used the element’s properties against it—triggered a reversal of sorts. Instead of allowing the element to destroy the cells of the body with the unique interplay of radiation and biology, as it was apt to do left on its own, she designed a switch. A very simple pathological switch—one that turned those properties of the element, and of the infection itself, into an advantage.”

I was out of crackers.

I looked at the tube of cheese and then at the doctor out of the corner of my eye.

No judgment here.

I squeezed the cheese directly into my mouth.

“Gross,” said Diana under her breath as she twirled a strand of hair around her finger.

“Wha bantaj?” I asked, mouth full. Swallowing quickly, I clarified. “What advantage, this strength and speed and sense augmentation? Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s going to kill us, remember?”

“Well, since you’re here now, I highly doubt it, but even so. Let’s assume you die in the next five minutes—”

“Thanks.”

“—you would have died several weeks ago, if not earlier, right?”

“I suppose so. But seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul and all that.”

He shrugged.

“In my world, measurements matter. By any measurement, you are alive now because of that vaccine… no matter your current predicament. If not for your wife’s work… well, we’d have much less to be thankful for right now. If I’m correct, and I anticipate that I am, the effects that you’re experiencing are nothing more than an unchecked acceleration.”

“In other words…” I asked, hoping for the short version.

“In other words,” he said, picking up the large sugar container and tipping it over the coffee mug in my hand. White granules started to drop into the lukewarm brown liquid. “Your wife designed a vaccine that countered the infection by strengthening the body—by using the element’s unique capabilities to strengthen rather than kill.”

The grains continued to tumble into the mug. The bottom of the cup was full, and the sugar had overtaken the coffee. The cup was half full.

“The body is currently on a mission—it’s producing strength and energy and pouring it into your body, like this sugar into your mug.”

The sugar poured out faster, threatening to overtop the rim.

“If it doesn’t stop, you’ll run out of capacity. You’ll run out of physical ability to receive this strength. So your body needs a simple signal sent to it.”

The sugar was millimeters from pouring over the sides of the cup.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Simple,” he said, sliding his finger over the small hole at the top of the container.

“Stop.”

The cup was full to the rim, but not a grain had fallen over.

“We just need to tell your body to stop. It needs one more switch. It needs to be told when enough is enough.”

I stared at the sugar in the cup, idly touching the top with my finger.

“Is that coffee?” Kate’s voice was soft and tired, and she smiled weakly as she walked into the room. Kopland smiled tightly at me and grabbed my arm once as he squeezed out of the tight space into the hallway.

“That’s what they tell me,” he said, walking toward one of the offices.